Memory Wall

Almost everyday in August Mrs. Sabo and I fish for sturgeon.  I row upriver and drift us home, dropping our cinder block anchor now and then to fish the deep holes.  I sit in the bow and Mrs. Sabo sits in the stern and Mishap sleeps under the middle bench and I wonder how memories can be here one minute, then gone the next.  I wonder about how the sky can be a huge blue nothingness and at the same time it can also feel like a shelter. (The River Nemunas, pg. 175)

A young boy and an old woman in South Africa, an infertile couple, an orphaned girl, the father of an American solider, a Chinese seller of seeds, and a woman who escaped the Holocaust – all these people are characters in Anthony Doerr’s collection of shorts stories called Memory Wall.  And while all are very different, the concept and power of memory binds them together:  the part memories  play in our lives, how we live with them, and how we live with their disappearance.

As with any short story collection some stories are better or speak to a reader more so than another story and that is what I found with this collection.  Two of the stories (Procreate, Generate and The Demilitarized Zone) do not seem as strong as the others.  However, the power of the remaining four stories as well as the overarching theme make this collection well worth reading.

The first story, Memory wall is set in the near future in South Africa.  An old woman is losing her memory but technology has reached a point where memories can be collected on tapes and replayed.  It is a memory of this woman’s past that connects her with a young boy and leads to a discussion of what is permanent and what isn’t. This theme of permanence is also carried out in an O. Henry award winning story Village 113. Village 113 is due to be inundated with water and submerged forever with the building of a new dam in China.  The village is evacuated except for an elderly seed seller and an elderly school teacher.  In this story, not only are individual memories dissappearing, but the cultural and historical memories of the village itself; “Every stone, every stair is a key to a memory.” (Village 113, pg. 146).  What is and isn’t permanent becomes an essential question as the only world, the only place the seed seller has ever known is disappearing.

The days seem made of twilight, immaterial as shadows.  Memories, when they come, are often viscous and weak, trapped beneath distance surfaces or caught in a neurofibrillary tangles.  She stands over the full bathtub with no memory of filling it.  She goes to fill the kettle and finds it steaming.

I found the last two stories to be the most powerful.  In River Nemunas, a fifteen year old American girl goes to live with her Grandfather in Lithuania after the deaths of her parents.  Doerr writes achingly beautiful passages describing the grief of this girl as she remembers her parents and contemplates someone else living in her home.  She develops a friendship with the woman who lives next door and together they fish on the river in search of a legendary sturgeon.   In Afterworld, an elderly woman suffers from bouts of epilepsy and through the seizures she remembers her childhood and connects with her childhood companions in her mind.  She lived in an orphanage in Germany, was evacuated just prior to the holocaust, and is the sole survivor of the girls who lived there.  This long story asks  what happens when the last person who has a memory of you dies.

Anthony Doerr has a clear, peaceful writing style.  He uses extensive metaphors and perhaps tries to drive his point home too often but not so much as you get bogged down in details because I feel this is balanced out by his spareness.  The over all effect is one of serenity and calmness and yet at the same time, Doerr reaches into your heart and really makes you think about the permanence of our very selves.

Doerr begins the book with the following quote:

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life with no memory is no life at all, just as an intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence.  Our memory is our coherence, our reason,our feeling, even our action.  Without it we are nothing.  Luis Bunuel, My Last Sigh

From beginning to end, Memory Wall drives this point home.

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